Half-Life and Times

Wednesday, November 07, 2018

Take the win

While a lot of you knuckleheads spent Election Night with your favorite disinformation channel on the tube and FiveThirtyEight open on your iPad, Jeannette and I spent the night at the Cradle enjoying a fantastic Psychedelic Furs set (nice opener by Liz Brasher too). We got home by 11 and I took a quick look to reassure myself that the House was going to be majority Dem and then went to sleep.I see a lot of hand-wringing from folks that did watch the results all night - I like the perspective I got by NOT watching it like a tennis match and just looking at the end results (I know there are still some undecided races out there, but you get my drift). By not sweating over every precinct return, I think I kept a little perspective.Democrats won enough seats to take the House. That might not have been the ONLY thing that mattered, but it mattered more than everything else. That means that Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters and Elijah Cummings are likely now to be committee chairs. That is a Big. Fucking. Deal.

Democrats picked up a large number of governorships, which will make a huge difference. Scott Walker and Kris Kobach went down in defeat. No, Dems didn't win Florida or Ohio, but they won a bunch. That is vitally important as we head into the 2020 census.

Closer to home, the GOP lost supermajorities in both sides of the NCGA, meaning that they will no longer be able to automatically override Gov. Cooper's veto. [Edit - I see I spoke too soon as there are races that are undecided. No more supermajority in the House but Senate is still uncertain.] And the two referenda that would have restricted the NC governor's powers were defeated. And the Dem won the State Supreme Court race. We've got districts that have been found to be illegally gerrymandered and we're in better shape now to ensure that that is resolved.

It was a good night. Maybe it wasn't a fantastic night, but it was a good night.

Now the cries will begin for the new House majority to "show restraint" and to "avoid legislative overreach". Complete and utter bullshit. The GOP House did not suffer from spending millions of dollars and 1000s of hours in incessant investigations of non-scandals like the IRS and Benghazi. The Dem House will not suffer from actually investigating the vast amount of real wrong-doing that is out there to be brought to light. If we have learned anything in the last two years (or last forty years) it's that there is no such thing as overreach anymore. The House turned more blue-ish because of Trump, not because of Devin Nunes or Trey Gowdy.

What the Democratic House does have to do is prove that it can walk and chew gum at the same time. There is no reason that they can't put forth a reasonable, progressive legislative agenda at the same time they investigate the massive fraud and misdeeds of the Trump administration. Yes, that agenda will be stymied in the Senate but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't try - that's what they were elected for. And that doesn't mean that if there's some area of common ground with the GOP, they shouldn't pursue it. But being seen as a roadblock to the Trump agenda will *not* be a negative, despite what corporate media will try to say.

And yes, they should pursue investigations professionally, reasonably and to the fullest extent that they can. There is plenty to investigate that others have pointed out over and over. And once they've started turning over those rocks and shining a light on what comes wriggling out, along with the next few weeks of Mueller investigation reveals, yes they damn well should start impeachment proceedings against Trump. The Senate may not vote on it but the Senate election landscape for 2020 is much more favorable to Dems than 2018 was and putting GOP Senators on the line for their votes on what will be obvious illegal activities from the Preznit will not hurt.

Nancy Pelosi will pick the the majority leader gavel again and should keep it until someone comes along that has her fund-raising and cat-herding abilities and not one second before. The fact that she's the boogie-woman that GOP uses to scare their sheeple at night should be seen as a badge of honor, not a detriment. They will use WHOEVER is in the position in exactly the same way, so it really doesn't matter.